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Square Enix's puzzle game will grab fans of the genre, but with such a meager feature set it may not be able to hold onto them for long. If you're a high score junky and enjoy working your way up online leaderboards then you'll likely find this to be a solid, if unremarkable, XBLA game. The head-to-head multiplayer mode provides some thrills but doesn't really have the legs to keep you coming back for more. Yosumin has charm and some fun ideas but it's not one of the more robust XBLA offerings.

Yosumin LIVE is a fun, catchy and adorable puzzle title. You can tell by its over-the-top emotional style and catchy pop-like music that the game is inherently Japanese. This is what makes Yosumin LIVE so enjoyable, it's just a shame that there is not much else to it.

The decision to buy Yosumin Live isn’t a big one, because the game will only set you back by 800 Microsoft Points (or about $10). The issue becomes whether you’ll try to fight through the hurdles (natural and unnatural) to milk some fun out of it. It’s in there, but it doesn’t seem as if it’ll sustain you for very long.

The concept at the core of Yosumin Live is robust, but it fails to hold up under extended play. Either Square Enix has happened upon a brilliant mechanic that has yet to fully bloom or one that it has been unable to sustain. The scant progression Yosumin has made in its transition from webgame to XBLA release indicates that perhaps it is the latter.

Yosumin Live is a lot more fun conceptually than it is in practice. The simple mechanics are easy to pick up and fun for a while, but recognizing patterns without being able to manipulate the board yourself becomes repetitive before long. Competitive mode adds a feeling of urgency and is still the best aspect of this otherwise monotonous game, though it lacks the depth that could have made it really exciting. Yosumin is a novel twist to the Bejeweled formula, but the genre king can rest easy on its throne for the moment.